Fernanda Rojas

The purpose of this article is, first, to examine the main characteristics of direct communication and show its importance in Kierkegaard’s communicative strategy. Second, we would like to argue that direct communication is not mutually exclusive with indirect communication, as is often claimed, but that the two can complement each other, according to Kierkegaard. To demonstrate this, we will trace the passages in which Kierkegaard discusses this notion in three main sources of the corpus: (1) the texts we call here autobiographical writings, namely On My Work as an Author and The Point of View, (2) the Postscript, and (3) the Lectures on Communication.

In this paper we wish to analyze how Kierkegaard understood the art of writing novels, that is, as a way to express and develop the life-view of the author. We would like to argue that this notion, presented for the first time in From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), was put into practice in the short novel Repetition (1843), in which Kierkegaard used the biblical story of Job to explain the development of selfhood through the existential category of repetition. According to Kierkegaard, true repetition—which is the central category of the life-view he is trying to convey—helps the individual “recollect” the past correctly so he or she can reconcile with the present and grow into the future.